FLOOD07351

• County: Larimer
• Community: Estes Park
• Stream Name: Lawn Lake
• Basin: South Platte
• Title: Lawn Lake/Estes Park Flood 1982
• Date: 7/15/1982
• Prepared For: State of Colorado
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Flood Documentation Report

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1978 by dam inspectors and preliminary reports were
prepared. The most recent visit to the dam was by tne
owner's superintendent on July 8. 1982.

A.

Attachment 0 is a summary of inspections prior to the
fiscal year just ended. Data for the last fiscal year
has not been completed. In FY 1976 "77. prior to the
National Dam Safety Program (NDSP), the State
Engineer's Office conducted more than 1,100 dam
inspections with five field engineers and a
supervisory engineer. This included all types of
inspections~ i.e. t safety evaluations, construction
inspections and complaints. A number are
reinspections. although precise data on this is not
available.

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The State Engineer's ott1ce believes it would take
twice as many engineers (12) to make 2,200 inspections
per year. Even then, this would require each
inspector to handle over 180 dams per year. This
could only be achieved with additional support
resources. Records for FY 81,82 indicate that about
60 percent of the inspections were safety evaluations
and the rest were construction inspections. That
would reduce the number of safety evaluations to .6 X
2,200 or 1.320. Assuming 12 engineers can make 1,320
safety inspections per year. it would take 20
engineers to do 2.200 dams plus other inspections and
related work. There are presently 8 FTE 5 approved
for the field eng1neering unit consisting of 7
engineers and a supervising engineer. Thus. an
additional 13 engineers including'at least two
supervising engineers would be required, Assuming 17
field engineers were assigned an equal number of
safety inspections, each would be assigned about 130
dams. This would be a reasonable number of dams to
inspect every year, along with the scheduling and
follow-up work as well as the construction inspections
and inspections of compla1nts, The field engineers
presently have about 400 dams each to inspect. In
order for a unit of this size to function properly.
additional clerical. secretarial. and technical
assistance would be required.

8y way of comparison. the State of California dam
safety program uses a staff of 60 people to administer
about 1,300 dams. The majority of tnese are engineers
and geologists, California has had very few dam
failures in the past 20 years. Its programs
concentrate on dams greater tnan 25 feet in heignt and
50 acre-feet in capacity. wnich is tne standard

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